How to Develop Collaboration Skills

Stephen Bush is the founder and CEO of AEX Commercial Financing Group. Steve obtained his MBA from UCLA and is a U.S. Navy veteran.

How to Develop Collaboration Skills

The Critical Importance of Collaborating Effectively

With technology and specialization playing a more powerful role in most organizations, business owners and managers have a growing need for their employees to collaborate with others — both inside and outside of the company. However, collaboration does not happen simply by executives saying that it is important.

As reported by the Harvard Business Review (based on research performed in 2007), “Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done.” Developing skills needed for effective collaborating is a prudent strategy for addressing this dilemma.

As a practical issue, it does not help that effective examples of collaboration are becoming harder to find — especially in the public sector. Both state and federal legislative bodies have approached a dysfunctional state in recent years. When a "government shutdown" is the best example of collaborative activity within the government, it does provide a startling illustration of how collaboration appears to be approaching extinction among politicians and lobbyists.

Questions and Answers About Collaborative Strategies

The Biggest Challenge with Collaboration?

Changing the framework from "Me" to "We"

Learn From Collaborative Leaders

Your journey for developing business collaboration skills should start at the top of your organization. Employees should be able to mirror the collaborative behavior observed in a company’s leaders. For example, the Hay Group has determined that top collaborative leaders possess three key skills — relationship building, interpersonal understanding and corporate commitment. These collaboration skills often take years to develop. Forward-thinking companies such as General Electric and Procter & Gamble plan 10 years or more into the future by assigning their executives to business roles that will help to develop a collaborative skill set. IBM uses a mentoring approach that allows employees to observe collaboration in action by skilled leaders.

Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done.

— Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson, Harvard Business Review

Nilofer Merchant: Innovation and Collaboration

Business Innovation Via Collaboration: The Book

Nilofer Merchant has worked in the business trenches where she has seen firsthand what a difference effective collaboration can make. In modern organizations, collaborative behavior can spell the difference between an average company and a thriving one. If you want to improve business collaboration in your company, you should read this book.

Co-Creation: A New Mindset

As described by Nilofer Merchant in a 2010 interview with the MIT Sloan Management Review, the concept of co-creation is a new management tool needed for developing business collaboration skills in today’s business climate. In the modern collaborative environment, employees need to feel that they helped to create the combined result of everyone’s efforts. This requires that a corporate pre-collaboration culture changes from “you” to “we.” According to Merchant, this requires businesses to move from “I think, you do” to “we think, we win.”

In the video above, Nilofer Merchant discusses collaboration and innovation.

Collaborative strategy gets us to ... go from “I think, you do” to “we think, we win.”

— Nilofer Merchant

Use Smaller Teams Whenever Possible

Educators and students are well-acquainted with how class size can impact the ability to learn. A similar finding was reported by Harvard University in a 2007 study. As these researchers noted, business teams usually consisted of 20 members or less until about 15 years ago. Teams of 100 members have recently become more common due to increasingly complicated business assignments for the team to perform.

However, it turns out that the previous team size — 20 — was much more conducive to effective collaboration. While larger teams can still be successful, effective collaborative results with over 20 individuals on the team can often require more time and effort.

Right-Sizing Collaboration

When Should You Collaborate?

Avoiding Collaboration Traps

Morten Hansen has produced a definitive book about several critical elements that can shape how effective your collaboration efforts will be. Most leaders seem to recognize how valuable collaborative behavior can be for their organization, but they get it wrong anyway in a high percentage of cases. Hansen provides the necessary insights to improve the batting average for collaborating.

Right-Sizing Collaboration

Collaboration experts such as Morten Hansen describe how important it is use the right dose of collaborative skills — avoiding both over-collaboration and under-collaboration. Simply collaborating is not enough. Some companies resist serious collaboration efforts because there is a difficult balancing act to get the right mix. For example, in 2011 Cisco decided to cut back on a structure that emphasized collaboration because the process had become unwieldy. One practical lesson from experiences such as Cisco’s is that developing effective collaboration skills takes extensive time and frequently requires some tweaking and patience along the way.

In the video above, Morten Hansen talks about when to collaborate — and when not to collaborate.

Leaders play a crucial role in getting this right. They not only need to orchestrate the conditions for employees to collaborate on the right things, but they also need to show a strong hand in guiding collaboration efforts.

— Morten T. Hansen and Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business Review

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